Anaconda-Deer Lodge County, MT
Anaconda-Deer Lodge County, MT's wildfire risk, in USFS's own numbers
Anaconda-Deer Lodge County sits at the 88th percentile nationally for wildfire risk to structures — in USFS's highest wildfire-risk band nationally — per USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities model, built from its 7,792 counted buildings, not vegetation cover alone. (Source: USFS's Wildfire Risk to Communities methodology.)
USFS's separate burn-probability score — fire likelihood alone, before counting what's built there — puts Anaconda-Deer Lodge County at the 86th percentile, close to its 88th-percentile risk score.
What "at risk" means for the buildings here
USFS puts 52.1% of Anaconda-Deer Lodge County's 7,792 buildings in the Indirect exposure zone, versus 47.3% Direct and 0.6% Minimal — a place where the fire doesn't need to reach the structure directly for embers to. At 7,792 buildings, this is a substantial built environment, so the shares below describe a real population of structures, not a handful of edge cases.
How Anaconda-Deer Lodge County compares
Inside Montana, Anaconda-Deer Lodge County sits at just the 73rd percentile even though it scores 88th nationally — the state's overall wildfire exposure is high enough to make this a relatively quiet corner of it. Among the 31,521 US communities USFS scores, Anaconda-Deer Lodge County ranks 3,653 for wildfire risk (1 is highest) and 2,185 by building count (1 is largest). Within Montana alone, it ranks 130 of 475 places by risk. See the full county-by-county picture for Montana on its state page.
Anaconda-Deer Lodge County and the insurance market
Anaconda-Deer Lodge County's 88th-percentile, very high rating is the kind of score behind a broader national pattern: insurers pulling back from the highest wildfire-risk markets, non-renewing or declining new policies outright, most visibly in California. Shopping around, not assuming automatic renewal, tends to matter here.
What would actually reduce this score
Because 52.1% of Anaconda-Deer Lodge County's buildings sit in the Indirect zone, sealing the ember pathway (vents, roofing, gutters) is the intervention this page's data actually supports — see the home-hardening guide.
More on how this number was built
Anaconda-Deer Lodge County's 88th-percentile score and its burn-probability figure both come from the same USFS workbook, documented in the methodology guide. For more on what indirect exposure implies beyond Anaconda-Deer Lodge County, see the exposure-zones guide.